1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of merchandise displays. More particularly, the invention relates to a graphical merchandise locator.
2. Description of the Related Art
Among the most common shopper frustrations in many of today's large stores is the effort it takes to find the desired merchandise. This often involves hunting down a store employee, which in itself can be a fruitless challenge. Some retailers have attempted to solve this problem with kiosks for shoppers to use. Retailer provided kiosks have not proven very effective and have not been rolled out to a significant number of stores. The primary shortcoming of these has been the rather unfriendly interface between the machine and the shopper. In virtually all known merchandise finder kiosks, the shopper is prompted to enter the descriptive name of the desired item and then to pick from a list of specific items falling within the scope of that, or a similar name. There are a few problems with this approach. There is often more than one term that describes the same product and it is difficult to capture all possible names or terms that shoppers might enter. Some shoppers refer to some products by trade names. Referring to items by their trade names further complicates the construction of such an interface.
In the case of some products, most people don't know the name of the product. This can be especially true in home center environments where the shopper may not be intimately familiar with the names of the desired item. For example, the “grill” that serves as the air outlet in a typical home forced air system is properly called a “register”, but few shoppers would know this. Additionally, a surprisingly large percentage of the population has poor spelling skills. Further aggravating the ability of a merchandise locator to identify a desired product is that English is not a first language for a significant percentage of the population.
In short, these challenges, and the inherent dullness of the spell and list method, have failed to attract a significant number of shoppers to use merchandise kiosks, even though finding merchandise persists as a problem.